We haven’t lived in President Obama’s America for long, but already we are witnessing a strange new phenomenon: Previously apolitical figures and organizations find themselves demonized, and then forgotten, with the speed, fury, and transience of a summer thunderstorm.
For most of his tenure at CNBC, Jim Cramer was a fairly apolitical creature. First and foremost a stock-market guru, Cramer stated that he eventually split from his partnered show with NRO’s Larry Kudlow “because politics is not my inclination . . . I just really don’t care for [the topic].” But Obama’s early moves spooked the market, and Cramer — who strongly and vocally supported Obama in last year’s campaign — called out Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, lamenting the “invisible Treasury secretary” and “the most, greatest wealth destruction I’ve seen by a president.”
Suddenly, Jim Cramer became a much bigger figure. Suddenly, he became
a regular butt of jokes on The Daily Show, and host Jon Stewart ripped into Cramer during their “interview.” Suddenly, the New York Times felt compelled to
spotlight Cramer’s bad stock predictions and
declare, “his personal brand has taken a beating in the last month.” Media Matters felt the need to
establish a new site, “Financial Media Matters.”
In recent months, the market has improved some, and Cramer has been less vocal in his criticism of Obama — and, strangely enough, he’s no longer considered so worthy of mockery by the usual suspects. The host retains his same manic, relentless, over-the-top style; but for some reason, when he stopped criticizing the president, major media voices lost interest in ridiculing him.
The latest entity to be subjected to this
Two-Minute Hate is the American Medical Association (AMA).
Americans generally like their doctors. Sixty-seven percent rate their physicians’ ethics and standards high or very high; the only professionals with a more favorable rating are nurses, grade-school teachers, pharmacists, and military officers. Most Americans don’t really think much about the AMA, and it seems likely that if the organization objected to a health-care reform proposal, patients would at least want to hear them out.
Last Wednesday, the AMA offered its most detailed response to President Obama’s health reform plans. The association disagreed with Obama that “creating a public health insurance option for non-disabled individuals under age 65 is the best way to expand health insurance coverage and lower costs. The introduction of a new public plan threatens to restrict patient choice by driving out private insurers, which currently provide coverage for nearly 70 percent of Americans. . . . The corresponding surge in public plan participation would likely lead to an explosion of costs that would need to be absorbed by taxpayers.”
Later in the day, the AMA
clarified its position: “The AMA opposes any public plan that forces physicians to participate, expands the fiscally-challenged Medicare program or pays Medicare rates, but the AMA is willing to consider other variations of the public plan that are currently under discussion in Congress.”
But it was too late; the group’s apostasy was already a matter of public record. Suddenly, Media Matters felt the need to
refute the notion that the AMA’s position might be that of America’s doctors, insisting that the group “speaks for less than one-third of doctors.” Coverage of the AMA’s announcement often implied that doctors don’t join because they disagree with the association’s stances, when in fact the trend in the profession has been for doctors to
join organizations based on their medical specialty.
At the Daily Kos site, contributors
argue that “the AMA is just as much a relic of a by-gone era as the little black bag.” One
declared that the time has come “to ask our own doctors to stand firm against the AMA or revoke their membership with AMA due to their opposition to a strong, robust Medicare-like public option.” Another post carried the none-too-subtle
headline “All Together Now: ‘Screw You, AMA!’”
By way of comparison, there was only one Kos diary that mentioned the AMA in March, and none in April; but since the recent health-care announcement, there have been 18. A switch has been flipped; the organization is now worth paying attention to and criticizing.
“When President Obama addresses the AMA today, he will be speaking to a group that is acting more like a typical Washington special interest than one that is concerned about the health and well-being of all Americans,”
said David Donnelly, national campaigns director of Public Campaign Action Fund.
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